When Ji Xiaohua founded the website Guokr.com he was on a crusade. Tired of reading the usual mix of superstition, rumour and fake news that abound on China’s social media feeds and blogs, he wanted to give the country’s web users a place to go for empirical, rational, provable facts.
Take the headlines in China. Senior officials are being prosecuted left and right for corruption in the greatest purge since the 1970s. Guokr took the opportunity to run a series of articles on corruption from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology. “We want to give people a place to go for scientific information on the issues of the day” says Mr Ji.
Finding a pulpit from which to preach science was what he had in mind when he and some friends started a club soon after graduating in 2007 from China’s elite Fudan University, in Shanghai. Called Scientific Squirrel, because “the idea was to crack the nuts in order to find the delicious fruit inside,” as he puts it, it had fairly modest objectives.